by Sean Howe
Marvel hired a full-time publicist for the first time, brought its licensing operations in-house, under Galton, and poured more energy into merchandising deals. All they needed to do now was to get people to buy their product. “The old Marvel needed comic books to sell so they would turn a profit,” wrote industry columnist Joe Brancatelli. “The envisioned new Marvel needs comic books to sell to ensure the profit potential of the characters portrayed within. Which means that the new Marvel and the old Marvel share one massive problem: how do you sell comic books?”
The staff continued to reshape. When Shooter hired Denny O’Neil back from DC to replace Wolfman, O’Neil noted how much things had changed. “Fourteen years ago,” he told an interviewer, “it was a three-person office. Stan Lee, Flo Steinberg, and Roy Thomas were it. You had a lot of day-to-day, minute-to-minute contact with what was going on. It was a small enough operation. Now there’s four or five editors, a magazine department, Epic, merchandising . . .” Roger Stern left his post to write freelance, and began a memorable run on Captain America with John Byrne; Jim Salicrup was promoted to replace him.* A few months later, Shooter hired Louise “Weezie” Jones, a beloved editor at Warren Magazines. The editor-to-writer ratio was growing.
Corporate synergy drove the publishing decisions. In comic stores, Marvel’s most popular title was the first issue of Rom, based on a Parker Brothers toy; among the many titles that outsold Captain America were The Micronauts, based on a line of Japanese toys; Shogun Warriors, based on Mattel toys; and adaptations of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.
When Stan Lee became worried that Universal was going to try to create a female Hulk character for its television show, which it would then own the rights to, he hurriedly wrote a preemptive solution. In the first issue of Savage She-Hulk, Bruce Banner visited his heretofore-unmentioned criminal-defense-attorney cousin, Jennifer Walters, in Los Angeles. When Walters was shot by gangsters, Banner gave her a lifesaving transfusion of his Gamma-ray-tainted blood, and she became big and green when angered. Presto: copyright secured. “It was done under duress,” said David Anthony Kraft, who took over the writing of the series. “It was like, ‘We need to create a character called the She-Hulk, and we need to get it out in the next thirty seconds.’ If you look at that first issue that Stan did, there’s really nothing to it: Bruce Banner gives a blood transfusion to his cousin, she growls and runs around, and that’s basically it. I grew up on Marvel Comics, and remembered Stan making fun of how DC had endless iterations of the characters: Super-Monkey, Super-Horse and Streaky the Super-Cat and on and on. We were all pulling our hair out and wailing and bemoaning the day that Marvel had to create a She-Hulk.”
Ms. Marvel had also been conceived as a trademark strategy (and an empty gesture toward feminism), but Chris Claremont had transformed her into a carefully shaded character by dwelling on her relationships with her parents and the challenges of her career. “We’re trying to appeal to a female audience, trying to make her a hip, happening, 70s woman striking out on her own,” Claremont recalled. “We say to the artist, ‘ . . . and we need her to look sexy.’ Well, his interpretation of sexy was derived from the ’40s, so what we got was a continuous series of crotch shots.” Claremont lobbied to get his old X-Men partner Dave Cockrum on the title, and they went through several dozen costume redesigns, trying to get it just right. No one had invested so much energy into a female superhero before, and, as Cockrum observed, no one else much cared. “When I brought in the one that was ultimately approved, Stan said, ‘why didn’t you bring me this one first? This is what I’m after . . . tits and ass.’ ” It wasn’t what the readers were after, though. Just as Claremont found his rhythm, Ms. Marvel was cancelled abruptly, without resolution, after the twenty-third issue.
Meanwhile, plans were in the works to reteam with Kiss’s label, Casablanca Records, for an ambitious cross-pollination experiment: Marvel would create a comic for the adventures of a new character called the Disco Queen; Casablanca would produce a record by a singer who would take on that persona. And Casablanca’s new film division would produce a Disco Queen motion picture.*
Since John Romita’s son, John Jr., frequented disco clubs, he was given the task of designing the character, which was renamed Disco Dazzler. “They said, ‘let’s do a character that’s a nightclub girl and a dancer and a disco queen,’ ” said Romita Jr., “and all I thought of was Grace Jones, a very statuesque, international-looking model with short hair.” Blue makeup—in a mask pattern not unlike that sported by members of Kiss—was added to her face.
A committee of employees—including Stan Lee, Jim Shooter, and Cadence attorney Alice Donenfeld—all contributed ideas to the character, and the record label gave plenty of notes in return. “At one point Casablanca decided they wanted her to talk ‘funky black,’ ” said Tom DeFalco, a former Archie Comics writer, who was assigned to script the first issue of Dazzler. By the time Bo Derek expressed interest in playing the character onscreen, Romita Jr.’s long-legged black roller-skater had transformed into a white girl named Alison with aspirations of pop stardom. Her super-power was to transform sonic energy into powerful blasts of light, which not only made for an impressive stage show but stopped criminals as well.
Even as the project was getting off the ground, though, disco was fading. In the summer of 1979, nearly a hundred thousand people had shown up for Comiskey Park’s Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. Casablanca, plagued with financial troubles, soon pulled out of Dazzler; there were multiple rewrites, and five cancellations and reschedulings, as Marvel scrambled to find new corporate partners to make the Dazzler film. “I swore that I would not believe that it was going to be published until I saw it on the newsstands,” DeFalco said. Although it would be another year before the first issue of Dazzler saw print, the character was quickly rolled out as a high-profile guest star in The X-Men and The Amazing Spider-Man.
Marvel creators bristled at the rampant shilling. As soon as the Fantastic Four cartoon went off the air, Bill Mantlo and John Byrne gleefully used the comic book to explode the NBC-sanctioned character of H.E.R.B.I.E. the Robot, much as Gerry Conway and Ross Andru had once demolished the Spider-Mobile. As a triumph of creative purity over bottom-line concerns, though, it was a pyrrhic victory. Elsewhere in that very same issue, Johnny Storm sauntered into the Studio Infinity discotheque and ran into a special guest star: the Dazzler.
Not every Marvel comic was an advertisement for something else. One of Shooter’s first creative shake-ups had been to hire DC exiles Bob Layton and David Michelinie to write Iron Man. They added depth to Tony Stark’s personal life, playing up the caddishness and self-loathing that might go along with being a heavy-drinking, disco-dancing captain of industry and international playboy. Between whiskey sours and amaretto-and-scotches, their Iron Man flew around listening to Poco on his headphones and breaking promises to pretty ladies. Iron Man’s new penciler, John Romita Jr., was only twenty-one years old when he got the assignment, but already possessed a storytelling style as brisk as John Byrne’s. Layton inked the comic himself, paying special attention to the gleam of metal and the shine of the wine bottles and chrome furniture; he scanned GQ and Playboy and electronics magazines to nail the consumerist details, updating Marvel superheroes for the age of American Gigolo.
Daredevil also found its niche, after years of neglect. Veteran artist Frank Robbins had been set to take over the title, but when he retired to Mexico at the last moment, assistant editor Jo Duffy advocated for Frank Miller, whose interest in film noir and ballet made for a dark, elegant crime saga. Before long, Miller was giving plot input to writer Roger McKenzie, and planning a next step as a writer.
The jewel in Marvel’s crown, though, was The Uncanny X-Men. At conventions, fans bestowed their praise; at comic stores, they spent their dollars. The title’s indisputable star attraction was the beer-guzzling, cigar-smoking Wolverine, whose gruff loner persona offered a romantic archetype onto which introverted readers could project their o
wn solitary existences. Behind the scenes, Claremont and Byrne hashed out the kind of intricate character origins that might be employed by a dedicated method actor: Wolverine was old enough to have fought beside Captain America in World War II, they decided, and his father was Sabretooth, a villain who’d appeared once in Iron Fist. But instead of disclosing these details, they slowly parsed out clues to the excruciated and enraptured audience that reveled in the mystery: Why does Wolverine speak fluent Japanese? Is “Logan” his first name or his last name?*
Not since Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four had a single title contained so many interconnected characters, so many mini-mythologies. Over long months Claremont and Byrne teased their readership with revelations that Professor X had wandered through Egypt after the Korean War; that the interplanetary pirate named Corsair was actually Cyclops’s long-lost father. In one issue, Byrne rolled out a whole team of super-powered Canadians at once, so colorful and varied they seemed instantly ready for their own title. The group, named Alpha Flight, was a clue to some kind of Canadian government experiment that had given Wolverine his claws . . . but for the specific circumstances, well, the readers would have to stay tuned.
The X-Men’s most rewardingly labyrinthine adventure involved the return of Jean Grey. Still wandering around Scotland, believing the X-Men dead, Grey fell under the spell of Jason Wyndgarde—a mustachioed dandy in Victorian dress who was actually Mastermind, an old Lee and Kirby villain, in disguise. With the help of psychic villainess Emma Frost, Wyndgarde burrowed deep into Grey’s mind; soon she was fantasizing that she was an eighteenth-century aristocrat, married to Wyndgarde, and a member of a kinky, evil secret society called the Hellfire Club.*
When Jean Grey reunited with the X-Men, Wyndgarde followed her back to the States, where he tapped into her darkest desires, and where Frost, headmistress of her own school for mutants, raced against Xavier to recruit two potential students. The first was Kitty Pryde, who could turn her body intangible and “phase” through solid objects. (It turned out that a plucky, Jewish, ballet-studying thirteen-year-old math whiz with Leif Garrett and Mickey Mouse posters was just the ingredient The X-Men needed to snag the hearts of young readers, who began writing letters asking how they could be her boyfriend.) The other mutant was the Dazzler, in her first appearance, and it was a testament to Claremont and Byrne’s skills that they managed to turn a mandated cross-promotion to their advantage by tying the seediness of the overripe disco scene to the hedonism of the Hellfire Club. In a downtown Manhattan club, Cyclops watched in horror as Jean locked lips with Wyndgarde under gleaming mirror balls.
Grey went on to assume the persona of the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle. Decked out in bondage gear, she helped to capture the X-Men before finally breaking Wyndgarde’s spell. But all this naughty indulgence of her repressed desires had permanently corrupted her, and her personality submerged within the darkened power of the Phoenix force. She exacted a furious revenge on Wyndgarde: “You came to me when I was vulnerable,” she seethed as she attacked him. “You filled the emotional void within me. You made me trust you—perhaps even love you—and all the while, you were using me!” And then she drove him insane with what was essentially a bad trip—expanding his mind beyond his capability, until he was a vegetable. It was the darkest behavior ever seen in a Marvel comic, and it wasn’t over yet.
Stan Lee finally got the go-ahead to move out to California, and began shopping for homes in Los Angeles. Since Cadence was paying the relocation costs, Lee called Sheldon Feinberg at his office in West Caldwell, New Jersey, to give him the good news.
“I found Moe’s house—I want to buy it!”
The price was more than Feinberg had in mind. “Moe?” Feinberg asked. “Who’s Moe?”
“You know, Moe! From the Three Stooges!”
Roy Thomas was also out in L.A. submitting scripts for ABC’s Plastic Man cartoon and Three’s Complany, but things with Marvel weren’t so sunny. He’d prepared to re-sign his writer-editor contract that spring, but he was in for a surprise. “I can’t and won’t” guarantee writer-editor status, Shooter wrote in a letter.
I’m willing to go along with your doing your own line-ups, cover designs, cover copy, etc., and pay you for these things. I’m willing to give you editor credit or co-editor credit on the books that you do editorial work on, and in general, see to it that you are left alone. However, I want all work to pass through the office at each stage, and all assignments made from the office. I want the vouchering and records-keeping handled entirely at the office, and I want a regular staff editor to traffic and have ultimate responsibility for every book we publish.
Thomas would later complain that he’d been strung along for months, and that this was the first he’d heard that he wouldn’t be able to extend the contract as an editor. A terse phone call ended with Thomas telling Shooter, “I guess we have nothing more to say to each other,” and he called DC Comics to begin talks about a defection. An April 10 letter informed Galton of his resignation. “I was willing to accept his authority as editor-in-chief,” Thomas wrote of Shooter, “but could see little to be gained by knuckling under to the rest of the mostly uninspired and uninspiring lot he has hired as editors the past year or so.” A distressed call from Lee (who told Thomas that Marvel was fixing the contract) followed, and then another conversational standoff with Shooter, and then a call from Galton. Lee would be in town the following week, Galton told him—please come, as a personal favor.*
On Tuesday, April 22, Thomas, Shooter, Galton, and Lee had a heated meeting, in which Thomas was again told that there would be no contract guaranteeing him control of his titles, nor could there be a provision to do any work on the side for DC, an arrangement that DC was willing to accept. Thomas could sign the contract he’d been mailed—take it or leave it. “It’s been a nice 15 years,” Thomas told Lee, then walked out of the office and picked up his waiting girlfriend. “I feel very dirty,” he said to her. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He went directly to the DC offices, where he delivered a signed contract. He’d probably create characters at DC, he told interviewers. Unlike Marvel, they offered royalties.
“These fifteen years have been a ball,” Thomas wrote in a farewell note to readers, to be published in his final issue of Conan the Barbarian. Shooter refused to run the note. “It drove the final nail into the coffin,” Thomas said, “to the illusion that Marvel was anything more than just a company like any other.”
While Lee was shopping for a new home, and Thomas and Shooter were exchanging frustrated phone calls, the makereadies for X-Men #135 arrived at the offices. Jean Grey was now calling herself Dark Phoenix. The green of her costume was now dark crimson; the pupils of her heavily shadowed eyes were now blank. She raced out to space, hungry for energy to feed the force within. One panel in particular leaped out at Shooter: Jean Grey snuffing a distant galaxy’s sun, annihilating the population of a nearby planet. (A few pages later, for good measure, she murdered the crew of a ship in Princess Lilandra’s Shi’ar fleet.) Right there, amid ads for Hostess Fruit Pies, Bubble Yum, and Daisy BB Rifles, one of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s superheroes had committed an act of genocide.*
Shooter asked X-Men editor Jim Salicrup to see what was in the works for upcoming issues. In the pages of #136, ready to ship, Dark Phoenix returned to earth, and fought the X-Men, until Jean Grey returned to her senses—just in time for Lilandra and the Shi’ar to summon them so that Grey would stand trial for her crimes. In #137, Xavier demanded a “duel of honor,” and the X-Men battled the Shi’ar’s Imperial Guard on the moon. The X-Men lost, and Jean Grey was given a kind of partial lobotomy, preventing her from accessing the Phoenix force ever again. Depowered and slightly meek, she returned to earth with the rest of the X-Men.
The X-Men #137 was a double-sized issue, one of Marvel’s first big-splash publications since its decision to focus on the hard-core fans in the direct market, where advance orders had already reached a tremendous one hundr
ed thousand. But the story’s resolution, Shooter told Salicrup, wasn’t good enough. “Having a character destroy an inhabited world with billions of people, wipe out a starship and then—well, you know, having the powers removed and being let go on Earth . . . it seems to me that that’s the same as capturing Hitler alive at the end of World War II, taking the German army away from him and letting him go to live on Long Island.”
Jean Grey had to pay for her crimes, insisted Shooter. She had to die.*
Claremont had spent the last four years building up to a resolution of the Phoenix saga. All thirty-five pages of #137 had already been drawn. Now he and Byrne had to redo it within a matter of days. It was the first time, Shooter said, that he had handed down an edict that interfered with someone’s story.
It wouldn’t be the last. As soon as he signed off on X-Men #137, Shooter rolled up his sleeves and tinkered with another heavily promoted, double-sized comic: Avengers #200, in which Carol Danvers, Ms. Marvel, gave birth. In the original plot, Danvers was impregnated by the Supreme Intelligence, a blubbery, Wizard of Oz–like organic computer that led the Kree race. Shooter rejected this plot not for its general ickiness but because it was, amazingly, too similar to another comic that Marvel had recently published. A last-minute marathon plotting session between Shooter, writer David Michelinie, and artist George Perez yielded a story that revealed the baby’s father to be a stranded time-traveler named Marcus, who’d plucked Danvers from our time-stream and brought her to him. “I was able to implant my essence within you,” Marcus recounted creepily, “causing a condition that resembled pregnancy.” She was transported back to earth and gave birth to a child that grew at an accelerated rate of several years per day—eventually becoming . . . Marcus himself. When the Avengers, presuming Marcus a threat, forced him back to limbo, he scolded them for their folly. “I could have lived among you, using my knowledge of time and history to better the human race.” (As with Shooter’s Korvac story, the moral here seemed to be: trust power.) At the story’s end, Ms. Marvel volunteered to follow Marcus, thus sacrificing her life on earth to become the lover of her own son.